Speech, blogging, energy, employment

I have been fantasizing about how to provide jobs for all those 15 million Americans that are underemployed. My previous post "Some ways to expand the nation's skill set and knowledge base" http://kestsgeojedc.blogspot.com/2011/02/some-ways-to-expand-nations-skill-set.html seemed to strongly approach that potential, enabling all folks with home internet access to participate in a nationwide manufacturing system; but there would still be lots of folks left out. Even the homeless folks seeking some kind of work need to be included in the "everybody gets a job" idea. My fantasizing today came up with making a declaration that all under-employed people are automatically volunteers for increasing American productivity; but, the recent health insurance thing has pointed out that it may not be wise to set a precedent for saying all people are any particular thing, since some future tyrant political party might misuse such a principle. So I tempered it with the hypothesis that America could offer every American, every person in America, continuous opportunity to register as a member of a "everybody gets a job" system. I'd think that everybody could have a job found for them that they could do, no matter how handicapped the person is. 90 years old, wheelchair bound, severely autistic, paraplegic, whoever, ought to be able to do something productive and interesting to them, however tiny a task.

A thought now is that the conventional business system might take offense at such a thing, believing that a vast pool of desperate people seeking work, is needed to provide them cheap workers for their businesses, so as to maximize their business profit. But all they would have to do is offer the person a better job with adequate pay and benefits, to get the worker, I would think; thus make a little less profit but provide the worker with a better life as a result. Maybe this violates some principle of doing business (I recall the Ferengi's book of business principles in a Star Trek series; as well as the old saying "never give a sucker an even break") but I think as a whole Americans are better than that.

Anyway, this post is to celebrate President Obama's recent address http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/02/05/weekly-address-winning-future-through-american-innovation which covers a huge number of the things I have urged for decades, although offers different solutions in most cases. America needs to wean herself of most of foreign oil that saps tens of billions of dollars out of our economy every year so as to push our cars and trucks around and run the lights; so we need to diversify our energy sources to provide resiliency in our economy, since we are quite dependent on "energy" to do the muscle work that runs our civilization, no longer dependent on human and animal muscles to do stuff.

Putting people and innovators to the task of providing energy to America, is surely a useful way to put people to work. Some people say that America ought to do without those energy options unless they are done by private industry - but private industry has not been doing the job, no doubt due to the mandate to make the most profit right away, and much of that involves spending it on petrochemical energy sources, both here and offshore, business as usual stuff, nevermind the big picture effects on America and her people. Thus it won't get done, unless a bigger entity teams us all up to get it done, and that is commonly known as 'government". We all pool a part of our income to finance our greater causes, both long and short term; this is called "taxes."

China has outstripped America in the solar power field; no doubt China is as keenly in need of multiple and abundant energy sources as we are, but our local companies are not producing solar power panels, because China is eager to do it, and is supported by government financing so as to keep the price down, defeating the productivity in countries with no government support of the industry. Rooftop solar panels are probably not the major answer for our energy needs, but they can provide some of it while also offering a bit of energy in emergencies when the primary power systems fail for awhile. Wind turbines have the potential to put energy into a pool of primary power systems, as well as wave and tidal energy systems, geothermals too. Nuclear fission power stations have long been touted as if the only needed source of electrical energy; coal fired power generating plants continue to provide most of our energy here in America.

I won't dwell much again here on my own concept for an energy-supported centrifugal transportation structure system for building and maintaining abundant Solar Power Stations in geostationary earth orbit in this blog post, but that potential for the near or further future ought to be enough to ensure the continued exercise of space technologies. Those solar power satellites could obsolete even the nuclear power stations along with coal burning plants, but right now, business profits are rolling in for businesses by keeping things like they are. I also won't harp on the vision tha nature sequestered the carbon long ago in the form of coal and gas and frozen methane deep under the surface of the earth so that life could have an abundant oxygen atmosphere for high energy life to exist; that is getting lots of attention now, finally. It is important to keep life fairly stable for everybody, as we can cope with only so much in our daily lives, avoiding rocking the boat; but longer term survival requires a bit more vision and guidance for the American people, even for the world, than has been commonly practiced.

I think that the above-mentioned Obama speech addresses a lot of these issues in constructive ways, and I really appreciate that.